Taming the Salvage Beast

By Amanda Griscom Little, Grist.org. Posted June 27, 2004.

Catch the aboveground S train in Brooklyn and you'll whiz through the neighborhood of Crown Heights, an industrial pocket of warehouses and factories that once stored and manufactured everything from artillery to pickle jars. These days, the buildings you pass appear to be abandoned relics in a bleak concrete landscape. But then, just as T.S. Eliot is coming to mind -- "What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?" -- you hurtle by a bright green oasis of richly vegetated roofs and a glossy black array of solar panels on a refurbished 1850s warehouse.

This anomalous building has just been renovated by Brooklyn sculptor Benton Brown, 31, and his wife, Susan Boyle, 30. Both novices in the fields of construction and engineering prior to this project, Brown and Boyle managed to achieve a mind-boggling feat of ingenuity and perseverance. Over two and a half years, they transformed a 14,000-square-foot derelict brewery and ice-storage house into an apartment building of such style, sustainability and sophisticated engineering that it establishes the couple as pioneers among a new generation of green builders.

Next month, Brown and Boyle will finally declare their project complete. The building houses six loft units complete with radiant heating, natural ventilation, Energy Star appliances, a rain-water collection system, a high-efficiency condensing boiler, and vast expanses of super-insulated, floor-to-ceiling glass windows. Solar energy provides nearly half of all the building's electricity.

The project has been so successful that the couple won a $75,000 "Green Cinderella" grant from Keyspan Energy Company to cover one-third of the clean-technology costs, and are on track to get a silver rating from Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) -- the gold standard in green building ratings. What's more, they have a waiting list of potential tenants lined up to lease their units, and they expect to entirely recoup their sizable investment in this project within two decades.

Above all, having approached their project with a do-it-yourself, learn-as-you-go philosophy, the couple has proven that anyone can be a pioneer in sustainable building. Anyone, that is, with a basic knowledge of construction, a fearless relationship to blow torches, a penchant for grant writing, super-human patience with Building Department codes and green-construction manuals -- oh yes, and a network of private investors.

Lofty Ambitions

When Boyle and Brown first encountered the old factory, it had been inhabited for the past 20 years only by a healthy population of rats and pigeons. So there wasn't too much competition when, in November 2001, they made an offer on the old industrial carcass -- pests and all -- for a sum they decline to name but say was dirt cheap by New York standards.

Two years and $1.1 million dollars later (with funds coming largely from private investments by friends and family), they had trained a team of seven unskilled workers, taken torch guns to I-beams, changed the floor elevations, added mezzanines and cantilevered balconies, and installed vegetated roofs, reused fixtures, a seven-kilowatt system of solar panels, and a long list of energy-saving mechanisms.

"We definitely got a few Masters degrees and built our home at the same time," said Susan Boyle, the namesake of "Big Sue LLC," the development company she started with Brown. The real Susan -- who, despite having had no previous construction experience, was the subcontractor on the project -- is petite as could be, standing not much higher than five feet tall. But when you hear her bark orders at workers (she's been known to grab people nearly twice her size by the collar to make a point clear), the derivation of the company's name becomes abundantly clear.

Having worked for years at Transportation Alternatives lobbying for better urban infrastructure for cyclists, Boyle says she has always been interested in focusing her environmental energies in urban spaces. "New York City, to me, is the greenest city in the world," she said, "for the energy efficiency of its compact living and ease of public transportation."

Brown, on the other hand, started out with little interest in the environmental aspect of the project. "I've never been much of a political activist," he said. "All I knew about green building was, you know, yurts [and] structures made of tires and straw bales and stuff. It's not my thing." What Brown grew to appreciate was the economic and construction logic behind green building. "It was just amazing to find out how much better sustainable building functions than conventional building, how logical it is," he said. "I think of it more as 'high-performance' than eco-friendly."

Brown admired, for instance, the logic behind radiant heating. Embedded in the concrete floors (made of 45 percent recycled fly ash, the waste material from burned coal), the heating system warms up the flooring. The concrete floors, in turn, emanate heat upward into the lower seven feet of the room -- rather than the full 20-foot-high expanse of the lofty ceilings.

And he appreciated the functionality of the green roof, which covers 2,400 square feet and consists of four inches of soil planted with low-maintenance groundcover plants. It's comparable in cost to a regular roof and provides better insulation while also improving air quality and reducing runoff into city streets. (Water runoff in New York City overflows into the sewage system, thereby flushing sewage into the rivers surrounding Manhattan.)

Amanda Griscom writes the Muckraker column for Grist Magazine.

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